The Lend-Lease bill in Congress

On Friday 10 January 1941 identical bills were introduced in both houses of the United States Congress under the modest title “An Act to Further Promote the Defense of the United States, and for Other Purposes”. In the House of Representatives it was introduced by the Democratic majority leader, John W. McCormack, and in the Senate by his counterpart, Alben Barkley. In the lower house the bill was numbered H.R. 1776, recalling the year of the Declaration of Independence. Behind the dry title lay America’s most important political decision since the outbreak of war in Europe: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was asking for the power to supply arms to the countries fighting Germany without demanding payment in cash – in effect on credit that no one intended to collect in dollars. The bill, soon known as the Lend-Lease Act, opened a two-month debate in which the isolationists fought their last great battle. Its most celebrated episode was the appearance of the aviator Charles Lindbergh before the House committee on 23 January.

A bankrupt ally

Since November 1939 Britain had been able to buy arms in the United States on a cash and carry basis: paying cash and carrying the goods away in its own ships. This was laid down by the amended Neutrality Act, while the Johnson Act of 1934 additionally prohibited loans to countries that had not repaid their debts from the First World War, Britain among them. The British therefore paid in gold and dollars, selling off their American shares and bonds. After the fall of France they took over the French orders and placed new ones, for thousands of aircraft, tanks and ships, and their reserves melted away faster than anyone had foreseen. When on 23 November 1940 the ambassador, Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian, told journalists in New York that Britain was broke and needed American money, he was speaking against his instructions, but he was not straying from the truth. At the turn of 1940 and 1941 an American cruiser brought British gold from South Africa to New York so that London could pay for its current orders.

After the election of 5 November, Roosevelt, now free of a campaign in which he had promised in Boston that Americans’ sons would not be sent into foreign wars, looked for a way to help the British without asking Congress either for loans or for the lifting of prohibitions that had no chance of passing. In the summer he had handed them fifty old destroyers, concluding the destroyers-for-bases deal without Congress, but he could not give them money or arms worth billions of dollars in the same way. In December, while cruising in the Caribbean aboard USS Tuscaloosa, he received a long letter from Winston Churchill, dated 8 December. In it the Prime Minister described Britain’s position for 1941 and the tonnage losses in the Atlantic, and warned that the moment was approaching when his country would no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies. The President returned to Washington with an idea ready.

The garden hose and the arsenal of democracy

On 17 December 1940 Roosevelt put it to journalists at a press conference in the White House by way of a parable that has gone down in history. If his neighbour’s house was on fire, he said, and he had a length of garden hose, he would not tell him: “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.” He did not want the $15; he wanted his hose back when the fire was over, and if it was damaged, the neighbour would replace it. The point, he explained, was to “get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign”: the United States would itself produce the arms and hand them over to the British, and the account would be settled after the war, in kind or in some other way.

Twelve days later, on 29 December, the same night that German bombs started the Second Great Fire of London, the President argued in a radio fireside chat that there could be no question of a negotiated peace with Hitler, that the fall of Britain would expose the Americas to direct danger, and that the United States must become “the great arsenal of democracy”. On 6 January 1941, in his State of the Union address, he went further. He declared that a world worth fighting for rested on four freedoms – of speech, of worship, from want and from fear – and announced that he would ask Congress for authority and funds to produce arms for the nations fighting the aggressors. “We cannot, and we will not, tell them that they must surrender, merely because of present inability to pay for the weapons which we know they must have,” he said.

A Treasury bill

The text of the bill was drafted not in the State Department but in the Treasury of Henry Morgenthau, which had been handling British purchases for months and knew the state of British finances best. At the beginning of January the department’s lawyers, Edward Foley and Oscar Cox, prepared the draft in a few days. Cox, looking for precedents, recalled that a law of 1892 already allowed the Secretary of War to lease army property when he judged it to be in the public interest. The wording was also overseen by the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and the President’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, who on 9 January flew to Britain to see for himself what the British really needed. The number 1776 was given to the bill, according to the most frequently repeated account, at the suggestion of the House parliamentarian, who wanted to give it a patriotic ring.

The bill was short and at the same time extraordinarily broad. It allowed the President to authorise the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy or the head of any other department to manufacture or procure “defense articles” for the government of any country whose defence the President deemed vital to the defence of the United States, and then to sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend “or otherwise dispose of” them. The terms of repayment were to be fixed by the President himself: they could be payment, repayment in kind or in other property, or “any other direct or indirect benefit” that he considered satisfactory. The bill named no country, set no upper limit on the value of the aid, and gave the President the right to have foreign warships repaired in American yards and to pass military information to foreign governments. The first headlines, such as the Brooklyn Eagle’s of 10 January, stressed precisely that American shipyards would be opened to the ships of the Royal Navy.

The debate

Opponents at once saw the bill as surrendering Congress’s right to decide on war and peace. Republicans spoke of a “dictatorship bill”, and Senator Robert A. Taft quipped that lending war equipment was rather like lending chewing gum – nobody wanted it back. On 11 January the chairman of the America First Committee, the retired general Robert E. Wood, announced that the committee would fight the bill with all the vigour at its command. The harshest words, however, came from a Democrat. On 12 January Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, one of the isolationist leaders in the President’s own party, said in a radio broadcast that Lend-Lease was the New Deal’s farm policy transferred to foreign affairs: just as in 1933 every third row of cotton had been ploughed under to raise prices, so now it would “plow under every fourth American boy”. Roosevelt replied at a press conference on 14 January, calling the remark the most untruthful, dastardly and unpatriotic thing that had been said in public life in his generation.

On 15 January the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by the Democrat Sol Bloom, opened its hearings. The first witness was Hull, who argued that Germany was bent on world domination and that aid to Britain was the cheapest way of defending America. He was followed by Morgenthau, who presented a statement of British assets meant to prove that London really had nothing left to pay with, by Stimson and by the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox. Among those appearing for the opposition were the former ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy, who said that he supported aid to the British but not such sweeping powers for the President, and the Republican congressman Hamilton Fish, the bill’s most ardent opponent on the committee itself. Meanwhile, on 20 January, Roosevelt took the presidential oath for the third time, and on 24 January he sailed out in person by yacht into Chesapeake Bay to greet the new British ambassador, Lord Halifax, who had arrived aboard the Royal Navy’s newest battleship, King George V, to replace Lothian, who had died in December.

Lindbergh before the committee

The most eagerly awaited witness was Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 had been the first to fly solo non-stop from New York to Paris and who since September 1939 had been urging, in a series of radio speeches and articles, that America keep out of the European war. In 1936–1938 he had visited Germany several times, inspected Luftwaffe factories and units, and was convinced of their superiority. In October 1938 he had accepted a German decoration from the hands of Hermann Göring, something his opponents never tired of reminding him of.

On 23 January 1941 his appearance drew a crowd of spectators and journalists. Lindbergh read a prepared statement and then answered the members’ questions for about four and a half hours. He opposed the bill because, as he explained, it would weaken the defence of the United States itself without deciding the outcome of the war. He argued that America, if strongly armed, could not be successfully attacked across the ocean, either from the air or from the sea. He also maintained that even American entry into the war on Britain’s side would not suffice to defeat Germany, unless she collapsed from within; this was how the Brooklyn Eagle headlined its report of the hearing: Lindbergh says the US and Britain cannot beat Hitler. American intervention, he said, would only prolong the war and multiply the suffering of the nations already fighting it.

The exchange that provoked the most comment was with the Texas Democrat Luther A. Johnson. Lindbergh said that he sympathised with the people on both sides, but that seeking a decisive victory would be to England’s own disadvantage. Asked directly which side he wished to win, he replied neither, and that a negotiated peace was in the interest of the United States. In war chronologies his testimony is often summed up in the sentence that he recommended a neutrality pact with Hitler. Press reports of the hearing, however, speak of something slightly different: Lindbergh put forward no draft of any treaty with Germany, but argued for a compromise peace in Europe and for America not tying its fate to the outcome of the war. His critics pointed out that such a peace would in practice leave Hitler most of his conquests, and that the United States would have to come to terms with a Europe under German domination – and in that sense the shorthand of a “pact with Hitler” reflects how a large part of public opinion understood him.

The testimony made a great stir. For the bill’s opponents it was proof that one of the most admired Americans, an expert on aviation, considered aid to Britain hopeless. For its supporters it was proof that the isolationists were prepared to accept German hegemony on the Continent. On 6 February Lindbergh repeated his arguments before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Willkie on the President’s side

More important than Lindbergh, however, proved to be the stance of the man Roosevelt had defeated in November. Wendell Willkie had already backed the bill, with amendments, in mid-January, against the majority of Republican congressmen. On 22 January he flew to Britain as an unofficial envoy and saw the effects of the German raids. He carried with him a handwritten letter from the President to Churchill quoting Longfellow’s lines “Sail on, O Ship of State…”, which the Prime Minister quoted in a radio broadcast on 9 February, replying: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” On 11 February Willkie appeared before the Senate committee and called for five to ten destroyers a month to be handed to the British. When senators reminded him of his campaign charges against Roosevelt, he replied that it had been campaign oratory. His support meant that the dispute over the bill did not run purely along party lines, although most Republicans voted against.

On 8 February the House of Representatives passed the bill by 260 votes to 165: the Democrats overwhelmingly in favour, the Republicans overwhelmingly against. The Senate, after three weeks of debate, passed the act on 8 March by 60 votes to 31. The amendments adopted limited the President’s powers to 30 June 1943, allowed Congress to revoke them by a concurrent resolution of both houses, capped the value of equipment that could be transferred from existing army and navy stocks, obliged the President to report every 90 days, and stated explicitly that the act did not authorise the navy to escort convoys. On 11 March the House of Representatives adopted the Senate version by 317 votes to 71, and Roosevelt signed it the same day.

Place in the war

On signing the act on 11 March 1941, Roosevelt at once declared the defence of Britain, and of Greece, then fighting Italy, vital to the security of the United States, and on 27 March Congress voted 7 billion dollars for the first aid programme – more than the country’s entire defence budget of a year before. In May aid was extended to China, later to the governments-in-exile of the occupied countries, Poland among them, and in the autumn, after the German invasion, to the Soviet Union. By the time the programme ended in September 1945 the United States had supplied under it goods worth about 50 billion dollars, of which more than 31 billion went to Britain and its empire and more than 11 billion to the USSR: aircraft, tanks, lorries, locomotives, fuel, food and raw materials. The account, in keeping with the garden-hose promise, was not settled in dollars. Most of the equipment was destroyed in combat, and in return the United States secured from its allies commitments to cooperate in building an open post-war economic order.

The act decided more than supplies. A Congress that as recently as 1935 had banned the sale of arms to all belligerents, victims and aggressors alike, now allowed the President to choose a side and arm it at the American taxpayer’s expense. The United States, formally neutral, ceased to be so in any traditional sense of the word, and this was well understood in Berlin. The logic of the act led further: the arms had to be carried across the Atlantic, where U-boats were sinking British ships. In September 1941 the US Navy began escorting convoys in the western Atlantic and received orders to fire on German submarines, even though an amendment to the act excluded convoying on its authority. The United States entered the war only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war in December 1941, but from March it was already fighting as the “arsenal of democracy”.

For Lindbergh the January testimony was the start of a year that destroyed his reputation. In April 1941 he joined the leadership of America First and became its most popular speaker. When Roosevelt, at a press conference, compared him to Clement Vallandigham, leader of the opponents of the war in the Civil War era, Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the Air Corps reserve. On 11 September 1941 in Des Moines he accused the British, the Roosevelt administration and the Jews of pushing America into war, which even many isolationists regarded as an expression of antisemitism. After Pearl Harbor America First dissolved, and Lindbergh, who was refused a return to the armed forces, served the war effort as a civilian consultant to the aircraft industry and as a pilot. The debate over H.R. 1776 remained in American memory as the moment when the country, without declaring war on anyone, decided which side it stood on.